The Guardian Blames “Climate Breakdown” for Burkina Faso’s Dire Healthcare System
Burkina Faso is a very hot, very poor country. This, you would have thought, would be enough to explain a severely substandard healthcare system. But not according to the Guardian, which decided to invoke “climate breakdown” in a story highlighting the plight of a tragic young woman.
If your electricity grid is in a sorry state and, amid rapid urbanisation and the searing West African hot season, demand outstrips supply, there will likely be power cuts. If on top of these ‘regular’ challenges jihadis have devastated the stability of the country, then nothing will be easy.
If you’re living in Guardian-world, though, those factors aren’t the important ones. Rather, the most important, in comparison to which all others pale in significance, is “climate breakdown”.
Once when visiting my home country I told a friend’s small son that I lived in Africa. His eyes lit up. “You live in Ouagadougou!” My friend told me that his son was joking. He didn’t know that there was a place called Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. How his eyes widened when I told him that yes, I really did live there.
It’s warm in ‘Ouaga’. The coolest month for the averaged 24 hour temperature is January. Outdoors, at the coolest part of the night (around 5am), it gets down to 18°C. In West Africa, the ‘hot season’ is March to May; then the cooling rains begin. As hot season advances, extreme dry heat turns to extremely humid heat. By the time May arrives you’re thoroughly baked; the average daytime maximum will be 40-41°C, but in May the humidity means that your body will perceive the temperature as around 48°C. That’s outside, and in the shade.
Burkina Faso is far from wealthy. Situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert and with limited natural resources, its main export is labour: a few million work in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The country has the dubious honour of sitting at number one on the Global Terrorism Index, with millions of internally displaced people, a significant percentage of its population. With typical struggles after independence, corruption and poor security, in recent years it has had two military coups. The Government is in an acute, years-long struggle to establish control of the territory and much is in the hands of vicious killers. Foreign governments formally recommend you visit none of the country for any reason.
The challenges of jihadism have accelerated the ongoing pan-African trend of urbanisation. With high demand and limited resources in a small country, inevitably much construction is based on the principle of quickly throwing up whatever concrete edifice the limited funds will allow. Insulation, planning, affordable air conditioners? No. You can sleep outside: but the growing concrete releases more heat there at night every year too.
The struggles of a healthcare system in a country with these challenges are huge. To give you some examples: there are just two or three cancer doctors in the entire country, who will generally prescribe an identical treatment regime to everyone, and they may be away this month. There’s no accountability if anything goes wrong. Pregnancy and childbirth can be lethal to an extent that the West knows nothing of. Ce n’est pas facile, as the universal saying goes.
People die in private hospitals due to a mix of inadequate training, no accountability or consequences for mistakes, corruption and prevailing culture (mostly a blend of animism and relaxed Islam, with traditional superstitions mixing with a strong dose of fatalism). I remember sitting with a young father who was persuaded to accept and love his precious handicapped son, made in the image of God – only to see him killed when an unpaid nursing student put the feeding tube into his lungs. That was in one of the best private hospitals. If you go to a government hospital in most of Africa – and especially in one of the poorer countries – then you know to expect a challenge.
In the hot season, which the Guardian article is concerned with, things are especially bad. Why? The Director General of the national electricity company, Sonabel, went on national television to explain. From 2011 to 2024, demand on the electrical grid went up by 490 megawatts. During the same time period, investment added only 222 megawatts of capacity. Thirty percent of machinery was past its replacement schedule. The average age of thermal generators is 19 years, and for hydroelectric generators, 25 years. The country relies on importing power from nearby countries, who also have their own rapidly growing demand.
In hot season the demand for power is much higher (fans, air conditioners, increased load upon refrigeration units of all kinds). Consequently, countrywide during hot season 2024, there were power cuts for around eight to 10 hours a day (mostly in continuous blocks, which I believe to be unofficial rationing), and sometimes 14 hours.
Now imagine what it’s like in an poorly-staffed, under-resourced government hospital, with no air conditioners, fewer fans than beds, illness and sickness or pregnancy taking a toll on the body, and now frequent power cuts that go on for large chunks of the day? Can you really imagine that?
In the Guardian’s piece, a 36 year-old woman passes through her first pregnancy during the brutal 2024 hot season without power. She is mostly seen at the government Yalgado hospital. She suffers terribly. In the end she loses her baby to a miscarriage, and feels very alone, feeling helpless against the situation of brutal heat, lack of equipment and staff who can’t help or explain.
“This,” the Guardian informs its readers “is climate breakdown.” The regular hot season is re-branded as “heatwaves” and the article describes the problem as being something fundamentally to do with using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels! Those things which, if Burkina Faso had them more abundantly and more cheaply, would actually have provided working fans and air conditioners and saved many lives.
I am seething.
If you re-read the article carefully, you may well, like me, get the impression that the unfortunate lady herself most likely said nothing about climate breakdown, and it was the Guardian that shoe-horned that narrative in, getting a few token words in response to its prompting near the end. “I didn’t know if it was climate change or what.”
“This is climate breakdown.” No – this article is corruption. I don’t mean local corruption, but irresponsible foreigners with their own agendas, pushing their ‘climate breakdown’ political narrative whilst pretending to care. Shame on you, Guardian, using suffering people for your own ends like this.
As a Christian missionary, I tell people that what Burkina Faso needs most is Jesus. Certainly what it doesn’t need is the Guardian‘s pseudo-religious ideology that is evidently more important to the Western elites the newspaper’s journalism is aimed at than real people’s lives.
The author is a Christian missionary in Burkina Faso.
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There is absolutely no shame of any description at The Groan. To seek to make a news story out of a very poor woman’s loss of a baby almost beggars belief, almost as this is The Groan. What is completely unforgivable is to seek to link the baby’s death to a nonsensical, fabricated pseudo “science” commonly referenced as “climate change,” a pitiful load of globalist nonsense which looks only to kill millions more, and The Groan – ‘comment is free.’ Pathetic.
I really don’t know why anyone buys it.
They really don’t need Jesus. What they need most is an improvement in infrastructure. Even minor improvements can help a lot.
I think the author believes that with more God fearing Christians they’d have less corruption, and more impetus to fight off the jihadists. Then they’d be better placed to sort out the infrastructure.
Jesus would be better for them than Muhammed, I’m saying this as an atheist, although secular aid would be even better, provided it wasn’t used to teach them there’s 42 different genders or that all the problems in their country are due to colonialism.
Christian missionaries will often provide basic services such as health centres, paid for with donations from the church/denomination they belong to. How much money do Muslims, including the incredibly wealthy gulf states/sheiks, give for humanitarian aid rather than setting up Madrassas to indoctrinate kids or arming terrorist groups?
Fresh, clean drinking water?
Proper sewage networks?
What are you, one of those nasty Victorians?
So you can magic ‘ an improvement in infrastructure’ without any accompanying improvement to the culture?
If you can’t believe the ‘unbelievable’ bits of the New Testament, at least promote the rest. I rarely take on everything that someone promotes. In addition, it appears that marrying your cousins is a cultural burden that Britain avoids:
Why Cousin Marriage Is MUCH Worse Than You Think
https://youtu.be/Wh76SEzw4qY
Is “climate breakdown” the madleft’s new lie?
No shortages of lies in leftworld.
Shortages of everything else but not lies.
The Guardian is a joke, who on Earth reads that tripe?
Plenty of members of the self-declared great and good do, not to inform themselves so much as to bask in confirmation bias – all their preferred lies being spouted back at them.
It’s a journalistic comfort blanket for them.
Go on, say it: the BBC.
The Guardian – written by retards for retards as who else would put up with their constant lies.
HMG are apparently preparing facilities for Mass Fatalities, does anyone know more ???
They have put out tender requests for temporary morgue facilities for mass casualties.
Here you go Freddy. Paz 49 on YouTube…
https://youtu.be/tnwIdicywjg?si=Ud8edclt6EPVgSqs
Thanks Hux , I did see this but couldn’t find it anywhere , what’s going on is the question ??
I suspect there’s a typo, either in this article or the original Guardian one. Very few women, especially in developing countries have their first pregnancy aged 36. It seems far more likely that in a largely Muslim country Mariama became pregnant aged 16, or possibly 15 after being forced to marry a much older man possibly a cousin and this is why she was unprepared for her first pregnancy. Obviously the prevalence of child brides in Muslim countries is something the Guardian doesn’t want to acknowledge in case it causes “hurt and offence”.
I am sure the climate crisis agenda is well served if the citizens of Burkina Faso can also be brainwashed into believing their problems are all the fault of (white) man’s attack on the climate.
I suppose, since the UN has admitted that “Climate Change” has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with the transfer of wealth ….. in a strange way, The Guardian is simply reporting “the truth according to the UN” … but without admitting the REAL Agenda behind the Climate Change nonsense.
They should have included these quotes to explain themselves:
“Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
And
“U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres remarked, the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Thank Heaven for good people like the writer of this article.
If you read other Sceptic articles and look at the European Parliament, there is plenty of money funding and promoting the words of the media. Open borders is being twisted and promoted by the likes of Soros!
It probably feeds the narrative of climate change affecting poor countries, countries that are poor because of the governments!
The whole thing stinks!
Classic example of how the Progressive Left use climate change as a tool. When you can blame climate change on everything that happens, then everything that happens is never government’s or politicians fault. It is all our fault, and we MUST change behaviour, reduce consumption, face ever more draconian diktats, heavy taxation, unaffordable energy prices, the destruction of our Industrial Base etc etc. They use it o insist the crisis is so large that all individual freedoms must be removed, for ——“the greater good”. So what we have here then is ECO SOCIALISM, using climate as the seemingly plausible excuse.
Once the fear of climate change had been instilled then they set about legitimising it as if it were some kind of ultimate truth. The messaging spread everywhere, all the way from the UN/WEF down through all governments and media, the education system, etc etc down to local governments, and all large corporations, and all had to be aligned with the political agenda. The message was clear ——COMPLY or be EXCLUDED.